I wrote a letter to my neighbour. The text of it is below. It only happened one more time afterwards and a quick pound on the wall put a stop to it. Feel free to use it, word for word, or edit it as necessary.

hello neighbour

First, my apologies. It’s probably time we had you over to enjoy a beer or glass of scotch with us rather than the quick hello’s we’ve exchanged in passing.

This is a note just to address something that simultaneously requires help, and at the same time kudo’s. This will all become much clearer as you continue reading. As this can be an awkward topic, I’ll just dive right in to the problem.

Sex. 

Sex is the problem. 

No - that doesn’t properly cover it. Sex is great. Sex is wonderful. Sex isn’t really a problem. Vocal sex however, can be a problem. Not for those participating. Vocal sex is really a pretty good time for those immediately involved. Unfortunately, the designers of this building thought it might be a pretty neat idea to make sure that our master bedrooms share a wall. 

And vocal sex travels easily through one shared wall.

What this means to us, and you I guess, is that the middle of the night, your marathon sex sessions with healthy-lunged partners tend to drill through our bedroom wall and into our dreams. This of course makes sure that we are no longer in dreams where we should be at 4:30 am, but awake and trying to ignore the intrusion. If this happened once and we were all able to roll back over, call it a night, and blissfully fall back into sleep, all would be fine. However by the third time (and Bravo for that, by the way - kudos for the stamina) sleep really wasn’t coming back as readily as it did the first time.

Now... never in my life would I ever want to step in and mess around with another persons sex life. I just wouldn’t do that to another guy. As you are a man who seems to have a somewhat healthy one, far be it for us to demand it comes to a screeching halt. I mean, certainly not a screeching halt as I think that was really what prompted this in the first place. But any ideas you may have toward muffling, soundproofing, or even changing locations, would go a long way toward harmony between our households. 

One other thing before I close this up, and please ignore the request if this isn’t you - As much as we’d rather not participate in your (admirably active) sex life, we’d prefer even more to not participate in the post-coital cigarette. While the warm weather is still here, perhaps the window could be closed afterward to avoid it being blown into our bedroom window?

Anything we can do to help, please let us know. We’re here if you’d like to bounce any ideas off us. Knock on our door any time before 10pm if you’d like to talk further. I’d rather us get through this than have to awkwardly avoid eye contact for the remainder of our time here.

Sincerely yours,”

There is of course, a climax to this story (pun absolutely intended.)

We never discussed the letter further, always greeted each other politely, and on the day he was moving out, he knocked on our door with a bottle of wine. It was a parting gift he said with a rather large smile, and I took that opportunity to ask him if he’d taken offense to the letter. 

“On the contrary”, he said, as he laid his hand on my shoulder as though we’d been old friends and not awkward cohabitants with a terribly thin, unfortunately shared wall—“I framed it, and hung it on my wall. I’ve shown it to EVERYONE.”

I don’t think I’ve ever received higher praise.